News from artist, musician, archivist and renaissance man Peter Jetnikoff:
I’m currently working on two graphic novels, The Island and The Coast, one a kind of sequel to the other. Both vaguely in the horror genre but more like recent Japanese films like Ringu or Kairo that anything Gothic or Hollywood.
They have their origin in a short story I wrote a long time ago which I was going to recycle as clean waste paper about two years ago. I took a second look at the old arch file I kept the story in and thought: well, I’m on holidays anyway, read it again.
It was a self-conscious bore but for the setting and the characters so I started thinking of it visually and realised that all that time I’d spent years ago had persistently left out a face-slappingly obvious element: sea monsters. So, I now had a comic that needed doing.
The Island is set the week after the end of school 1979 on Magnetic Island, North Queensland where two school friends prepare to make their farewells to adolescence, what innocence remains within them, the provincial city they grew up in, and, finally, each other, before they fight lots and lots of seamonsters.
With The Coast, I decided to take the two characters who were leaving town in the first one and plonk them on the Gold Coast for Schoolies Week 1980 where the loss of innocence happens on an epidemic scale, hearts are torn, minds lost, and spirits vaccumed out of each last partying soul, before the entire place is invaded by insane numbers of sea monsters. (Ok, the last bit there doesn’t happen, but I thought, consistency and all.)
Apart from that I’m continuing on my voyage of discovery through the realm of short film scoring, having just handed one in to SBS TV and now getting through another with great promises of increased funding (which will probably just end up being a pot of beer and a packet of twisties at the pub but we must start somewhere).
Apart from that the Rouge Homme Pinot Noir has plummeted in quality since its magnificent 1998 vintage and … Oh, crikey, who am I kidding, I work, I play, I do my laundry.